Praise for
Convicted
“In Convicted, Mark Tabb has captured a story that illustrates the grace and redemption first modeled for the world by Christ on the cross. It’s also a story of an improbable friendship that will challenge your assumptions and transform the way you see all those who might live on the other side of town. Convicted is a must-read for anyone who longs for the day when the dividing lines of race, class, and bigotry are finally overcome by the greater forces of love, forgiveness, and brotherhood.”
—REV. SAMUEL RODRIGUEZ, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and author of Be Light
“What an amazing story of the work the Holy Spirit can do in our lives when we allow him and the power of forgiveness to heal all wounds!”
—DANIEL MUIR, former NFL player with the Indianapolis Colts and other teams
CONVICTED
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. Scripture quotations marked (KJV) are taken from the King James Version.
This is a work of nonfiction. Nonetheless, some of the names of the individuals involved have been changed in order to disguise their identities. Any resulting resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
Hardcover ISBN 9780735290723
Ebook ISBN 9780735290730
Copyright © 2017 by Jameel Zookie McGee and Andrew Collins
Cover design by Mark D. Ford
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in the United States by WaterBrook, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
WATERBROOK® and its deer colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McGee, Jameel Zookie, author. | Collins, Andrew, 1982– author. | Tabb, Mark A., author.
Title: Convicted : a crooked cop, an innocent man, and an unlikely journey of forgiveness and friendship / Jameel Zookie Mcgee and Andrew Collins, with Mark Tabb.
Description: First edition. | Colorado Springs, CO : WaterBrook, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017016086| ISBN 9780735290723 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735290730 (electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: Forgiveness—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Forgiveness of sin. | Interpersonal relations—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Friendship—Religious aspects—Christianity. | McGee, Jameel Zookie. | Collins, Andrew, 1982–
Classification: LCC BV4647.F55 M35 2017 | DDC 277.74/110820922—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017016086
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Author’s Note
Prologue
Chapter 1: February 8, 2006
Chapter 2: A Good Cop
Chapter 3: Mistaken Identity
Chapter 4: Two Plus Two Equals Four
Chapter 5: Indicted
Chapter 6: Into the Abyss
Chapter 7: Guilty Until Proven Innocent
Chapter 8: Wake-Up Call
Chapter 9: Becoming What They Told Me I Was
Chapter 10: Busted
Chapter 11: Let It Go
Chapter 12: “So You’re Guilty, Then?”
Chapter 13: Free at Last
Chapter 14: Facing the Consequences Once and for All
Chapter 15: Trying to Put the Pieces Back Together
Chapter 16: Broadway Park
Chapter 17: Losing It All—Again
Chapter 18: Reunion
Chapter 19: Beyond Forgiveness
Chapter 20: A Friendship Emerges
Chapter 21: It Is Well
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
AUTHOR’S NOTE
One hundred years ago, Benton Harbor was a growing town on Michigan’s sunset coast. The city boasted a trolley system, college, and opera house, along with an amusement park and semipro baseball team, both sponsored by the religious commune the House of David. Benton Harbor was originally founded in 1860 as a lake port that specialized in exporting fruit. In the 1920s factories began sprouting and brought rapid growth. The landmark Hotel Vincent was built in 1926 with the eighth floor designed to accommodate its most infamous guest, Chicago gangster Al Capone. Mansions sprang up along Pipestone Avenue, which runs through the center of town. Benton Harbor continued to grow through the 1930s and 1940s as black families moved from the southern states to work in local factories.
By the 1960s the boom days were over. While Whirlpool kept its headquarters in Benton Harbor, most of the high-paying manufacturing jobs that had built the area simply disappeared. Racial tension grew. Most white residents moved to the other side of the St. Joseph River to the town bearing the same name. Some still refer to Benton Harbor and St. Joseph as twin cities, but they could not be more different. Today, Benton Harbor’s population is over 90 percent black, while St. Joseph’s is over 90 percent white. The median income in Benton Harbor is barely 30 percent that of St. Joseph and slightly more than one-third the national average. Nearly 40 percent of Benton Harbor households get by on less than $15,000 a year.
The streets and city services reflect the state of the city. Potholes cover most of the roads away from Main Street. Taxes are some of the highest in the state, even though most residents struggle to pay them.
The first racially charged riots hit Benton Harbor on August 30, 1966, following the shooting death of an eighteen-year-old black man, Cecil Hunt, by a white man. After three consecutive nights of rioting, Mayor Wilbert Smith asked Governor George Romney to send in the National Guard. Even with more than seventeen hundred troops converging on the city, full order was not restored until September 5.
The gulf between predominantly black Benton Harbor and white St. Joseph grew even wider over the next few decades. As more and more factories shut their doors and poverty gripped the city, drugs and gang violence spread. Even today, Benton Harbor has one of the highest murder rates per capita in the United States.
Racial tension and violence erupted again in 1991 when the body of a young black man, Eric McGinnis, was fished out of Lake Michigan. He had last been seen at a St. Joseph club where weeks before he had met and started dating a white girl. (Eric’s case was chronicled in Alex Kotlowitz’s 1998 book The Other Side of the River.*1) The night Eric disappeared, a white man claimed he saw Eric breaking into his car. The man chased him away and toward an off-duty white deputy sheriff. Even today, many in the town are convinced Eric was murdered.
Benton Harbor exploded once again in 2003 following the death of twenty-seven-year-old Terrance Shurn. A black man, Shurn died after crashing his motorcycle during a high-speed chase with white police officers who sought to cite him for not having current license plates. Two months earlier another black man, Arthur Partee, had died in a struggle when police attempted to arrest him for an outstanding traffic warrant.
The two cases brought to the surface nearly forty years of racial tension. After two nights of rioting, several homes and businesses were burned down. Rioters also targeted the fire trucks that attempted to extinguish the blazes. More than two hundred state police officers restored order, but the tensions never went away.
Nor did the presence of the state police. Members of the community believe the police unfairly target them. The riots also expos
ed the sense of hopelessness and despair of a city racked by high unemployment, poverty, violence, and drugs. Politicians have long vowed to resolve the problems, but on the tenth anniversary of the 2003 riots, reporters found the problems that had sparked the riots still remained. Nothing of substance had changed for those who lived in Benton Harbor.
There are real attempts being made even today to improve the city. Not long after the 2003 riots, a Jack Nicklaus signature golf course, Harbor Shores, was built on the south end of the city near Lake Michigan. A resort hotel and spa soon followed, with an upscale housing edition planned as well. A December 15, 2011, New York Times Magazine story heralded the building of the golf course as a new day for Benton Harbor.*2 Civic leaders claimed the building of the course and hotel would bring in needed tourist dollars and increase the tax base of the city.
Perhaps that will someday be true. But to truly understand Benton Harbor, you need only drive to the corner of Broadway and Weld to Broadway Park. At first glance the park appears encouraging. A bright-green-roofed gazebo sits in the middle of the park with what appears to be fairly new playground equipment nearby. Basketball courts sit on one end of the park, with swing sets directly across. When you look closer, however, you notice the swing sets are missing swings and trash is scattered across the ground.
But that’s not what sets Broadway Park apart.
Before you walk across the park from the corner of Broadway and Weld to the gazebo or slides or swing sets or basketball courts, you first pass a three-foot-tall water hydrant standing not far from the sidewalk. Officially known as a bury hydrant designed to keep from freezing up during the cold Michigan winters, the hydrant leans noticeably to one side. And in the middle of the hydrant, perhaps a foot below the handle, a steady stream of water shoots out of a hole in the side. Long ago someone tried to plug the hole with tape, but it didn’t work. Now the tape pushes the water downward, where it collects at the bottom of the hydrant. In the summer the ground around the hydrant resembles a wetland. In the winter it becomes a skating rink. But no matter the time of year, the water continues to shoot out the side of the hydrant, just as it has for years.
Residents used to complain to city hall about the hydrant. After all, the homeowners around the park help pay the water bill, and they do not want to pay for water running out on the ground year-round. But the city has claimed it does not have the money to fix the leak or replace the hydrant, which would cost around fifty dollars at any home improvement store. Eventually people quit asking the city to do anything. Now the water runs and runs and runs, and people accept it because that’s just the way things are in Benton Harbor.
To understand Benton Harbor and the hopelessness that seems to pervade the city, you need only visit the forgotten leaking hydrant in Broadway Park. The people in the community feel just as forgotten.
Convicted is only one story of life in Benton Harbor. Maybe its hopeful ending is just what this town—and all of us—needs.
—Mark Tabb
Spring 2017
* * *
*1 Alex Kotlowitz, The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America’s Dilemma (New York: Anchor, 1998).
*2 Jonathan Mahler, “Now That the Factories Are Closed, It’s Tee Time in Benton Harbor, Mich.,” New York Times Magazine, December 15, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/magazine/benton-harbor.html.
Andrew
The crowd parted like the Red Sea. At first I could not see what was happening or why the hundreds gathered in Benton Harbor’s Broadway Park for our church’s Hoops, Hotdogs, and Hip-Hop Festival moved aside so quickly. But then I saw him. I recognized the face but I had trouble putting a name to it. Whoever he was, he was angry, angry enough that the crowd instinctively cleared a path for him. And he was heading straight toward me.
To be honest, I had expected someone like him, in an apparent rage, to come and find me. This was, after all, the first time I’d shown my face in the heart of Benton Harbor since my release from federal prison. A couple of people I’d arrested back when I was a policeman had already found me. I ran into one guy at a mall right before I went to prison. He thanked me for coming clean about what I’d done because it got him out of jail. The rest of these reunions had come after my release. I ran into people at the grocery store and at gas stations and anywhere I went in the area. Some tried to act tough when they first saw me, but they ended up just smiling and laughing because they’d gone free while I went to prison. A couple others had cussed me out for ruining their lives. One guy threatened to get even.
And now this.
I glanced around the park, looking for my five-year-old daughter. Bringing her to the park with me had seemed like a good idea when I left my house. What can go wrong at a block party? I thought. When my daughter asked if she could play on the swings with some other kids, I told her sure, have fun. Who wants to spend a day at the park watching her dad hand out snow cones? Now, as I watched this angry man march through the crowd, a little boy and another man struggling to keep up with him, I wished she were right next to me. Perhaps he might think twice about doing anything in front of a five-year-old girl.
The man walked straight up to me, stopped, and stuck out his hand. I took it. “Remember me?” he asked in a tone that sounded more like a threat than a question.
Somehow a name came to me. “Jameel McGee,” I replied. His grip on my hand tightened when I said his name. I tugged back a little, which only made him grip down that much harder, to the point of pain. I half expected to hear my bones crunch.
I looked closely at Jameel to try to get a read on what he was about to do. While I was a cop I was pretty good at reading people. What I read in Jameel made me even more nervous. His jaw was clinched, the muscles pulsating on the side. I glanced over to the man who had come up behind him. He looked terrified, not of me, but of what was about to happen. Then there was the little boy, who seemed more interested in the snow cones than anything else. He was a little older than my daughter. I hope she doesn’t come over here right now, I thought.
My mind raced. I had to do something to diffuse the growing tension, so I did what I had planned to do in exactly this situation: I apologized. “Jameel, man, I am so sorry for what I did to you. I, er, I was an addict back then, not to drugs, but to my own ego and making a name for myself. That caused me to do a lot of stuff I’m ashamed of now. I was a real messed-up person back then, and unfortunately, people like you paid the price for that. I am so sorry.”
Jameel’s expression did not change. His grip stayed tight on my hand. I couldn’t feel my fingers.
“But I’ve got to tell you,” I continued, “that I’m a new person today. That guy you’re mad at, I’m mad at him too, because, you know, he threw away his career and he left his wife and daughter behind when he went to prison. But that guy’s dead now. He was crucified with Christ. Today, I’m a new creation in Christ. I am a different man, one who is very, very sorry for what I did to you back then.”
The whole time I was talking, I was staring at Jameel, looking for some sort of reaction, either good or bad. But there was nothing. His expression never changed and his grip never loosened.
When I finished my little speech, Jameel huffed a couple of times and sort of shook his head. He bit his lip and looked over toward the little boy, then back at me. Finally, without loosening his grip on my hand even a little bit, he nodded over toward the boy and said, “I need you to tell him why his daddy missed out on three years of his life.”
I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. What was I supposed to say to that? I didn’t have an answer. I couldn’t give him back his time with his son that I had taken away from him. But I also thought perhaps we had made a little progress because he hadn’t punched me in the face yet. I decided to build on that. I now knew the little guy was his son. Jameel is a dad and I am a dad, so I decided to connect with him on a dad-to-dad level. I wanted to let him know I understood his pain and frustration because I had fel
t it myself. So, like an idiot, I opened my mouth again.
“Jameel, man, I’m sorry. I know how you feel. I missed out on eighteen months of my daughter’s life when I went to prison,” I said.
Immediately, Jameel said, “I don’t care what you missed out on.”
I shut up. You idiot! I shouted at myself in my mind. Why did you bring up your little eighteen-month slap on the wrist when he served three years because of you?
I wanted to disappear, to grab my daughter, jump in my car, get out of Benton Harbor, and never come back. More than anything, I just wanted this to be over, not just my confrontation with Jameel, but all of it. I’d already quit one job when a customer recognized me as the guy who put him in prison and threatened to come back and shoot up the place. How many more times was I going to find myself face to face with someone who blamed me for ruining his life? And when might one of these meetings turn into something from which I could not walk away?
Jameel’s jaw muscles kept flexing. The grip on my hand grew even tighter. He didn’t just look angry. I saw a war going on inside this man, a war I believed was about to spill outside as well. The man with Jameel turned away like he didn’t want to see what was about to go down. I braced myself. It had been a long time since someone had hit me in the face.
I hope my daughter doesn’t see this, I thought.
Jameel
I knew I was taking a chance driving with a suspended license, which was why I was extra careful. I didn’t speed. I didn’t float any stop signs. I signaled before every turn. My taillights and brake lights all worked. The police should not have pulled me over, but this was Benton Harbor, and I am a black man, so I got pulled over anyway. The cop was cool, though. When he ran my license and found out it was suspended because of a couple of unpaid speeding tickets, he could have run me in. But he didn’t. He handed me a ticket and told me to drive home and park my car until I paid my fines. That’s cool. Okay. I can do that. I had no plans for the rest of the day anyway.
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